New York Marathon Officials Determining How to Proceed

The marathon’s course does not pass through Lower Manhattan, which lost power Monday night and experienced significant flooding.Credit
Michael Appleton for The New York Times

As officials evaluated widespread storm damage, organizers for the New York City Marathon began work Tuesday to determine how Sunday’s race might be affected by flooding and power outages.

“N.Y.R.R. continues to move ahead with its planning and preparation,” Mary Wittenberg, the chief executive of New York Road Runners, the group that organizes the marathon, said in a statement. “We will keep all options open with regard to making any accommodations and adjustments necessary to race day and race weekend events.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — a marathon booster because it generates hundreds of millions dollars in economic activity — said Tuesday night that the race would go on as scheduled, but that additional details would be provided Wednesday.

Putting on a five-borough race with 47,000 runners, 8,000 volunteers, 1,000 staff and 2 million spectators just days after a devastating storm will be challenging as the police and fire departments, electric utilities and transportation agencies attempt to get the city back on its feet.

“There will be a marathon,” said Norman Goluskin, a board member at New York Road Runners. “I don’t know how many thousands of people will run it, but I will say with confidence that 47,000 people will not be the number.”

Runners and fans, though, have been arguing whether holding the marathon is an act of triumph or tastelessness in light of the storm, a debate that evokes the days after the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when Major League Baseball considered when to restart the season.

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Central Park, the home for the finish of the New York City Marathon, will remain closed until debris and fallen trees have been cleared.Credit
Carlo Allegri/Reuters

“They need to cancel and focus on getting their city back together,” Crystal Sara Martin wrote on the New York City Marathon’s event page. “It doesn’t seem right to continue to have this marathon when their city and their own people are affected.”

Some runners questioned whether the food used for the race should be diverted to the hundreds of thousands of people who lost power. Others, including a few who would have come from overseas, said they had already deferred their spot in this year’s race and were hoping to recoup the cost of their plane tickets and hotel rooms.

For now, the course remains a question mark. Many of the city’s bridges and tunnels only reopened Tuesday afternoon and some roads are still impassable, so race officials had not determined whether any part of the 26.2-mile course was flooded. Typically, race officials drive the course several times in the days before the race to ensure that nothing is blocking the roadways and their equipment is in place.

The marathon’s course does not pass through Lower Manhattan, which lost power Monday night and had significant flooding. But about half of the nearly 50,000 runners take the Staten Island Ferry, which leaves from the Battery, to get to the starting line early Sunday morning. The ferry may resume service, but subways leading to the Battery may not be operating.

And although the starting line is high up on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the first leg of the course in Brooklyn curls up Fourth Avenue, not far from areas that were flooded Monday night. From there, runners head north through Queens, hugging the East River and crossing over the Queensboro 59th Street Bridge.

The course winds up Manhattan’s Upper East Side, through the Bronx and down into Central Park, which will remain closed until debris and fallen trees are cleared. Critically, many fans, runners and volunteers rely on New York City subways to get to the race. Limited bus service was expected to return Tuesday night, but there is no timetable for the resumption of subway and railroad service.

Race officials said they were in contact with city agencies. At least for Road Runners, electricity is less an issue because it uses its own generators to power equipment at the start and finish lines.

The storm, though, forced race officials to work out of a hotel a few blocks from their office on West 56th Street. A construction crane that collapsed Monday is hanging perilously about 80 stories above West 57th Street and the police ordered buildings nearby to be evacuated.

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The course takes marathoners across the 59th Street Bridge. On Monday, a police officer closed an area near the bridge.Credit
Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Runners staying at the Parker Meridien Hotel, also on West 56th Street, also had to leave Monday. About 80 percent of the hotel’s 726 rooms are filled with runners and their families during marathon week, said Steven Pipes, the president of the Jack Parker Corp., which owns the hotel. He said the hotel may reopen Wednesday, but runners may arrive late because metropolitan-area airports were closed.

More than 5,700 flights were canceled Tuesday, bringing the total number of cancellations caused by the storm to 15,500, according to FlightStats.com. Kennedy International Airport was expected to reopen Wednesday, but travel experts said it could take several days, or even into next week, for passengers to be rebooked.

Wittenberg said in a conference call Monday that an elite runner from Italy rerouted his flight to Miami and, weather permitting, to Hartford and then on to New York. Kenyan runners, who typically arrive on the Tuesday before the race, faced delays as well.

There are nearly 20,000 runners from overseas, and thousands of other runners who come from elsewhere in the United States. Before the storm, Wittenberg said, runners would have had until Wednesday to withdraw their entry. That deadline will be extended to Saturday, she said Monday before the storm hit. Runners will be guaranteed a spot in next year’s marathon, but they will lose their entry fee from this year and have to pay a new entry fee next year.

Runners have been swapping travel tips online, like which airports to use and which hotels had power. On Monday night in Madrid, Luis Alonso, a 32-year-old lawyer hoping to run his third marathon, watched images of the storm on television and wondered if his flight to New York on Wednesday would be canceled.

Alonso searched for alternate routes to New York via other European airports in the event his flight from Madrid was canceled. “You plan and train for months,” he said by phone Tuesday. “So of course you want to run. But we cannot complain. We see people on TV with their homes damaged.”

Road Runners is planning to use the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on the Far West Side of Manhattan starting Thursday to host an exposition where marathon entrants can pick up their bibs. The Javits Convention Center had some flooding, and building systems were being tested Tuesday.

“We are working closely with the New York Road Runner’s Club on their plans for runner registration for this weekend’s marathon,” a news release from the center said.

Juliet Macur contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on October 31, 2012, on page B11 of the New York edition with the headline: Marathon Officials Determining How to Proceed. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe